After visiting my family for the month of May I traveled back to Europe for the summer race season. I would be running for my club Fossum IF at Jukola, a few days later racing at the Norsk O Festivalen: Norway’s largest weekend of orienteering races, and then head to Hungary to compete at the Junior World Championships (JWOC).
The Portugal O Meeting became my season opener because of its fast and open terrain, making it the perfect preparation for this year’s Junior Worlds in Hungary. Thus, I came into these races with a high level of intensity, hoping to simulate as much of a JWOC situation as possible.
Preparation started about a week before with some map reading while running intervals on the treadmill. Here Marius (my training partner from Norway) and I took alternating controls and explained how we would navigate to the control after a short glances at the map.
I been have in Norway for just over one month now and things are heading in the right direction. This year I will be living at Ronningen, a folkehøgskole in Oslo, Norway. Here I will be training for orienteering, going through an intensive Norwegian course, and also experiences norwegian culture! 🙂
The Scottish 6 Days was a great start to my training year in Norway. After coming back from a post-JWOC recovery week I was excited to have the chance to race hard at another large international competition!
This year my primary focus was to prepare for JWOC. Over the past several months I have spent dozens of hours looking map reading, making courses, and just trying to prepare myself for the terrain.
After a hard week of training with the Americans I needed both a mental and physical break before making my final JWOC preparations.
I used this time to visit a few friends in Helsinki who were kind enough to show me around and take me out for runs. First I stayed at my friend Essi’s whom I had met two years ago when she was on an exchange year in Chicago.
After Jukola Christian, Sofie, and I were lucky enough to be able to join the American Junior Team for an intensive training camp around Tampere. It lasted for about six days and each day had a morning fitness session of either agility or core, as well as two orienteering sessions.
Jukola was an incredible experience! The mass start with over 1700 people was probably one of the craziest things that I have ever done and as soon as I saw the forest and streams of lights within it, I knew that this would be a totally unique race.
After arriving in Helsinki I stayed at one of the American Junior’s homes: Anton, who has and will be helping me with planning out what to do in Finland. The next morning I headed out to a friends apartment in Tampere to start getting used to the JWOC terrain.
Continue reading “Getting back into it and the Finnish Trials”
As always the Flying Pig was a blast to attend! It was my first A-Meet since the NAOC’s and ran in my first ever Night-O 🙂
Jan Erik Naess 